A treatment of one colonial family, across several generation, based on family diaries and memorabilia, the paper turns on the question of why a colonial exiled after the expulsions of 1956 continued to identify with the Egyptian locale. His last wish was to be buried in Alexandria. Using Shirley Ardener’s idea of dominant and muted discourses, the paper argues that the dominant image of the British colony is one shaped by imperial sentiment; however, the paper identifies a muted discourse on the self-identification of ‘British’ with the Levantine community of Alexandria. This might not seem exceptional, except that in dominant imperial discourses of the era the Levantine had negative connotations; it was a signifier of a loss of British identity and immersion into a morally suspect, foreign category. Conversely, by mid-twentieth century the Levantine was identified by Egyptian nationalists as a foreign category. The dominant is here meant to refer to collective or official memory, as for instance recently argued by Susan Slymovics and Sami Zubaida. The muted voice, like individual memories, is less likely always to fit into the norms laid out in a collective memory. The Levantine was very much a muted form of self-identification. Whereas official policies insisted on a culturally distinct British/Egyptian identity against the Levantine through legal definitions of nationality, the paper offers instances where the categories were reordered through communal identification with these marginal, Levantine communities. The Levantine identification of Michael Barker had political ramifications, apparent in the choice to remain in Egypt when others emigrated out, to continue to invest in the Egyptian economy when others divested, and to cling to the remnants of those symbols of belonging, the very last of which was the family tomb. That act memorialized colonial lives that stood in marked contrast to the ascendant narratives of nation and empire.